Luke: >https://wiki.parabola.nu/Emulator_licensing_issues > >This may prove useful in the event of further research/discussion. this was mentioned, and it's missing crucial information.
let's add ndiswrapper to it. it would be classified as "free + free use", but it is still rejected; because [0] classifies it as "free + useless free use" or "useless in freedom". proposed definition of "usefulness" for emulators: free software _needs_ it as a runtime dependency; or development tool acting as hardware replacement. ndiswrapper fails both, so it's useless in freedom. qemu emulates current hardware, so it succeeds the second. wine is needed for notepad++[1], so it succeeds the first. wine fails the second, so we could provide it just as a dependency not directly installable. hatari (atari st) and ppsspp (psp) fail the second. psp was discontinued in december 2014[2], so it is possible to argue it is not obsolete; but we probably should not support it for development anyway[3] these information and others already there is not really about an emulator, but about the architecture/board ("driver" in mame[4]); we could have separate tables describing architectures/boards and emulators. mame is so flexible [4] it's really tricky. a current main processor architecture can have all boards failing the above criteria, directly. how much main processor emulation needs board emulation? if a board is needed and there are no other similar emulators/disassemblers/debuggers for that architecture with boards succeeding the criteria, the most recently discontinued board should get an exception. answering [5], mac-on-linux was removed from debian/trisquel by being unmaintained [6]. [0] and [6] should be refactored or merged. [0]https://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines [1]needs checking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Windows-only_free_software [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Portable [3]boycottsony.org [4]18:34 https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/hardware-reverse-engineering-insights-from-the-mame/ [5]http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2016-04/msg00122.html [6]https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/software-does-not-respect-free-system-distribution-guidelines